Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Hillary Rodham Stalin

At the time of Watergate I had overall supervisory authority over the House Judiciary Committee's Impeachment Inquiry staff that included Hillary Rodham-who was later to become First Lady in the Clinton White House.

During that period I kept a private diary of the behind the scenes congressional activities. My original tape recordings of the diary and other materials related to the Nixon impeachment provided the basis for my prior book Without Honor and are now available for inspection in the George Washington University Library.

. . .

After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O'Neill's statement that: "To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series."

Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee's then-most-recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff-where they were no longer accessible to the public.

Hillary had also made other ethically flawed procedural recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not hold any hearings with-or take depositions of-any live witnesses; not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Department's special Watergate prosecutor.

Only a few far-left Democrats supported Hillary's recommendations. A majority of the committee agreed to allow President Nixon to be represented by counsel and to hold hearings with live witnesses. Hillary then advocated that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee the right to question witnesses. This recommendation was voted down by the full House. The committee also rejected her proposal that we leave the drafting of the articles of impeachment to her and her fellow impeachment-inquiry staffers.

You know, some people like to refer to Hillary as “Hillary Milhous Clinton” but I think that’s unfair. To Nixon.

Update: Commenter Dennis Prouse suggests that this video provides a more apt comparison:

3 comments:

That is indeed unfair to Nixon. The better comparison for Hillary can be found in the movie, "Election". There is a great video done by Slate, comparing Hillary Clinton to a grown up version of Tracy Flick. Do you remember the part where Tracy Flick does a soliliquy expressing her anger with the Johnny-come-lately who is spoiling her rendez-vous with destiny? In this video, they splice in shots of Barack Obama. :-)

Well, Joan, just like Nixon, we won't have Hillary to kick around much longer. :-) The most certain sign of her campaign's imminent demise is the fact that those very reliable "trading markets" are now favouring Obama something like 78-21. She is in complete free fall now, meaning we will find out very soon if Barack is the new Reagan, or simply "New Coke".

When political analysts start poking through the wreckage of her campaign, I am convinced that they will find that she jumped the shark the moment Bill played the race card in South Carolina. That was a monumentally dumb decision that galvanized the youth and black vote behind Obama, and made Hillary look like an artifact of the past instead of an agent of change.

It is SO nice to see both the Clinton machine shut down, and to see Bill's reputation tattered, all in one shot. I have a feeling that the price Bill can command on the lecture circuit just went down a bit.